Re: [PATCH v4 4/4] notes: teach git-notes about notes.<ref>.merge option

[Jacob Keller <jacob.keller@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Aug 12, 2015 at 12:16 PM, Jacob Keller <jacob.keller@gmail.com> wrote:
> Oh interesting. I did a test. If you provide a fully qualified ref not
> inside refs/notes, then it assumes you meant refs/notes/refs/foo/y
> rather than refs/foo/y
>
> I need to do some more digging on this to determine the exact thing going on...
>
> Regards,
> Jake

I did some more digging. If you pass a notes ref to "--refs" option,
that requires all notes to be bound to refs/notes/* and does not allow
passing of arbitrary refs. However, you can set the environment
variable GIT_NOTES_REF or core.notesRef to a fully qualified
reference.

That seems very arbitrary that --ref works by expanding notes and the
environment variable and configuration option do not... [1]

I think this inconsistency is very weird, because *most* people will
not use refs/notes/* etc. This makes it so that --refs forces you to
use refs/notes/* or it will prefix it for you... ie: you can use
notes/x, refs/notes/x, x, but if you use refs/tags/x it will DWIM into
refs/notes/refs/tags/x

I think this is very confusing that --refs doesn't behave the same as
other sections... either we should enforce this on all refs or we
should fix the DWIM-ery to be consistent.

that is, we should fix DWIM-ery to be:

(1) if it starts with refs/* leave it alone

(2) if it starts with notes/*, prefix it with refs/

(3) otherwise prefix it with refs/notes/

But that way, refs/some-other-notes/ will work fine instead of
becoming something else.

We should also fix reads of environment variable etc such taht we
enforce these values always are fully qualified and begin with refs.
Otherwise, use of --refs and the environment variable don't allow the
same formats.

Regards,
Jake

[1] 8ef313e1ec3b ("builtin/notes.c: Split notes ref DWIMmery into a
separate function")